Sunday, December 29, 2013

Update on Terry's Recent Poster.

I thought it was funny. Of course I took a lot of shit over the early Twitter stuff, too. Humor is tough, I guess, and maybe mine doesn't work. Sorry.Terry

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Hello all. These things often come to boil very quickly. A bunch of rascals used a variety of anonymous email accounts to barrage us with notes more or less saying that we're bigots, especially Terry, and it was ugly and sad - and not altogether unfamiliar to us.

There are academics who hate this fucking page, and take any opening to attack us for anything they can twist into rationale.

Terry chose to take the image down even though the notion that he was being racist in the tag line is laughable. My favorite comment was on the page; someone suggested we "lightened" the complexion of the supposed "target." Yeah, because that's how we hoped to save our good reputation.

Terry's right in his note above. Humor is funny - get it, funny? We don't all laugh at the same things. I'd urge him to keep working for us. He has been a steady and dependable voice around here, and I think we're better off with his contributions.

Also, I've put the original poster up again so you can decide for yourself.

WTF? It means all students are plagiarists. Hyperbole, but it seems like it sometimes. You think the ethnicity of the student on the far right is the target? What about the sorority girl? The African American student? The guy with impetigo? Is Terry's "bigotry" just tweaked by guys from, uh, where is he supposed to be from? Color me confused.

PG, that's the punchline. They're all indistinguishable snowflakes, so it could just as easily be any of them. The "especially..." drives home the point ironically, by opposition. At least that's how I interpret it.

The moderators, of which Terry P is one of several, have modified the photo by lightening the skin of the target of the blog's bigotry. He was clearly Hispanic / Latino, and the suggestion by this page that Hispanics and Latinas are more prone to cheating is reprehensible.

You say you're a group of academics, but you're petty and ineffectual fascists. Look it up. Doesn't matter how you COLOR this issue. It will be your downfall. You don't fuck with RACE in this country and get away with it.

Really? The plagiarist is not the dark-skinned lady? Or one of the white guys, who both look a little light on their shoes? No? The dumb-looking blonde, then. Still wrong? Well, that leaves sorority brunette, I guess.

I interpreted the punchline as meaning the one on the right was the worst because he seems to have a guess-what-I-got-away-with-ha-ha smirk on his face.

I had students in my courses who got away with all sorts of malarkey and they knew they could because I couldn't present enough irrefutable evidence to prove that they did it. Many of them had the same smug look.

Mr. Barnard, if you learn to spell people might take you more seriously. Oh fuck, who am I kidding? Nobody takes your race-baiting seriously here. Get a life, dude, they're all indistinguishable snowflakes, white as the driven you-know-what.

One person, under several names, is being a jackass. It's not hard to find the original image on the web, and it's obvious that there has been no lightening of his skin in the secondary image. Not that it would matter if there were. There's one person, one very dishonest person, who is experiencing tremendous delight in causing a stir. That person is right about one thing: we should be ashamed, at least a little, that we give a shit what such a liar says.

I appreciate your sentiment very much, but in this case we now have about a dozen folks who've raised a stink in a dozen different locations. Our stat programs collect IP addresses so we can track the occasional troublemaker. And to answer a common question today, no, the regular CM troll has not been a part of things today.

Indeed, except free proxy services show up as such in our IP logs, and we noted no concerted effort to disguise identities in any of the comments or emails. We have a past moderator to help with this, someone who has done a bang up job of observing and monitoring such subterfuge.

I'm VERY sorry to have been a catalyst for a flood of hate email to Leslie K and to have flabbergasted dear Cal. I thought my comments were brief, moderate and polite, and am astounded to come back to the page to find that I started a shit storm.

For what it's worth, my teenager found Terry's punchline funny and my comment out of touch. I now take my leave from this discussion, with a bow.

My dear Proffie G----I want you to know that it would take more than one odd post to turn you, in my mind, from a smart, compassionate colleague to a troll. And anyway, your post WAS brief, moderate and polite. It is obvious, at least to me, that someone had a need to cause trouble, and saw an "in." In any event, I hope you have a wonderful, restful, fun and festive break. Happy New Year!

Are you effing kidding me? This is absurd. The guy in back is obviously guilty because of the nifty trapper keeper-like binder he holds. They are ALWAYS guilty, those trapper keeper-holding little fucks. C'mon sheeple, wake up!

I Skyped with Les last night and what we both said that there were moments yesterday where the mail and comments were a lot like what you see on lots of Internet sites. We're awfully lucky that we only deal with a small amount of "comment madness," but when it comes up it seems so disorienting. Bravo to all for getting through it. Well done, Les.

Just came through after seeing the original a few days ago. I thought it was funny at the time, and took it exactly as Peter K explained.

For what it is worth, I teach at a place where we have VERY MANY different ethnicities. Whites are definitely the minority. And I thought the dude on the far right was just a regular old white dude. He certainly looks main stream suburban white kid to my eye.

That's how I saw it, too (from the perspective of teaching a similar student body). The kid on the right reads to me as "generic white guy." If pressed for a guess about ethnicity, I might suggest some Mediterranean ancestry (Italian? Jewish? Arab? but also-- black Irish?), but that's about it. The woman to the left of him strikes me as coming closer to what the generic student is going to look like in 50 years or so: medium skin tone, with ancestors probably coming from at least two continents, and quite possibly more. In the present context, she reads as "ethnic" (in a system where white/European is somehow still the default conceptual category, even when it isn't in practice); he doesn't (though the dark, somewhat wavy hair might have labeled him as such 100 years ago in the U.S.; these things do change over time).

If the guy on the right had appeared to have Asian ancestry, I might have understood some objections, since there are some generalizations floating around about different understandings of the value of originality, respect for authority, etc., etc. that suggest students coming from Asian cultures may have more difficulty understanding the western concept of plagiarism. Honestly, I haven't seen that in practice. I do think there's an increased danger of plagiarism from any ESL student, but, at least at my institution, most of them seem to have been well and thoroughly warned about plagiarism, and to be terrified of committing it, so those who aren't quite to the level of being able to paraphrase competently mostly just quote way too much.

Mostly, I read it the way Peter K did: you could have stood them in any order with the same caption (and/or mixed in pretty much any pleasant-looking kid, of any gender, ethnicity, style of dress, etc., etc.), and it would have been equally correct. You definitely can't pick out a potential plagiarist by his/her looks or demeanor, and you can't always pick one out by previous work (though a lot of late/incomplete work, and/or lots of changes of topic, are possible red flags).

But I don't doubt that each of our experiences plays a role in what we see. One of the things I like about teaching at an institution that is extremely diverse without needing to make that a conscious goal of its admissions policy (we simply have an applicant pool that is already very diverse) is that there is no correlation whatsoever between my students' apparent races/ethnicities and their academic performance (or, sadly, their periodic propensity to academic dishonesty). The good news is that, simply as a matter of demographics, student bodies everywhere will increasingly look like the ones Bella and I teach.

Some people just make me want to bring back rolling my eyes. What's that? The young people are still rolling their eyes? Good. INSERT EYE ROLL.

Come ON, people: it's a common phrase used in funny comedies. No one is being outrageously (or even passively) racist: everyone was targeted as a plagiarist, and the phrase "especially X," is such a commonly used comedic phrase that I am astounded people didn't get it. Of course, if you have to explain the joke, then it stops being funny...

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.